Seattle-area startup Lumotive landed $13 million to spice up manufacturing of its semiconductor chips tailor-made for 3D sensors utilized in supply drones, self-driving vehicles and cellular dwelling robots.
The spherical was led by Samsung Ventures, with participation from new traders USAA and Uniquest. The recent money pushes complete funding so far to greater than $56 million.
The Redmond, Wash.-based startup makes use of metamaterials to “steer” laser gentle. The corporate’s fundamental product is its Gentle Management Metasurface (LCM), a patented beam-steering semiconductor.
Lumotive launched in 2017 and spun out of Bellevue, Wash.-based Mental Ventures. It’s amongst a flock of different startups utilizing metamaterials together with Kymeta, Echodyne, Evolv and Pivotal Commware. The corporate says it has greater than two dozen prospects in autonomy, automation and augmented actuality (AR) markets.
“Our LCM (Gentle Management Metasurface) chips are uniquely positioned to handle the broad vary of notion and security necessities throughout these sectors,” CEO Sam Heidari mentioned in a press release. “This extra funding will speed up the deployment of the present era of LCM chips and the event of the following era of our product.”
Lumotive was based by William Colleran, who departed in June 2021, and Gleb Akselrod, the corporate’s present chief expertise officer. Hedari, the previous CEO of Quantenna Communications, joined in October 2021. The corporate has about 31 workers, in accordance with LinkedIn.
The sensor expertise business has been consolidating lately. Luminar, a publicly traded lidar {hardware} firm, introduced Wednesday it acquired San Francisco lidar knowledge startup Civil Maps. Autonomous car startup Aurora acquired OURS Know-how in February 2021, the second lidar startup it has acquired in lower than two years. Aurora additionally purchased Blackmore, a Montana-based lidar startup, in Could 2019.
Lumotive is presently exhibiting off its tech on the Shopper Digital Present in Las Vegas, alongside MicroVision, a Redmond, Wash.-based startup promoting microelectromechanical (MEMS)-based automotive lidar and options for superior driver help methods.